Wie kann man Gott verstehen? / How to Understand God?(Part 1)AUTHOR: Gerd Döben-Henisch DATE OF FIRST GENERATION: Nov-02,2002 DATE OF LAST CHANGE: Oct-3, 2006 EMAIL: webmaster_at_doeben-henisch.de |
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| In our daily experience we know, that to understand another person depends heavily on the way whether and how we can perceive something from this other person. If the other person would stay in a complete static state, absolutely no movements,like a dead body, we can --in the normal case-- nothing 'know' about this person. But seen from the inside of this other person there can be thinking, feelings, conscious states, etc. At the same time when external persons perceive this person lying there like a dead body, can inside this 'dead body' the 'conscious mind' of this person run through deep mathematical theories, could have feelings from wild things going on, or could even stay in a prayer, connected to God in an un-sayable fashion. | |
| If people are living together like a couple, they know too that to 'love' the other person 'inside' is not enough for a true living together. When the 'partner' shall be able to 'experience' some bits of the love of the other one, one has to 'show' this 'internal' love through 'bodily events'. The 'bodily expressions' are the 'medium' through which the internal love of the lover has to be manifested for the other one. Only then, when 'something bodily' happens has the other person a small chance to experience something about the 'internal love' of the other one. | |
| As wonderful as it is that a person does 'express' some of its internal states by bodily expressions, the 'event' of a bodily expression is for everybody who is perceiving this (how often we even do not perceive...) by far not trivial. If person A does make a bodily expression e, what does this 'mean' for another person B? Has the expression e meaning at all? There are lots of 'movements' of a person A which we usually would not interpret that they have a 'meaning'; but sometimes they do. When? Under which circumstances? 'What' do they 'mean'? | |
| It would need many books of thousands of pages to explain only this question in full detail , because many scientific disciplines have dealt with this questions since more than 100 years, and philosophy has discussed this topic already at least 2500 years, and science is still continuing with the exploration of this question, but there are no simple or complete answers until today. | |
| Nevertheless we know something, perhaps this will suffice. From daily experience we know, that the 'meaning' of a bodily expression depends from the relationship between the expression e and 'something else' d in the available experience of human persons. If this 'something else' d for example is an object in the commonly shared empirical space, maybe a chair, where you can sit on, then, we know, one can come to some 'common agreement' that the bodily expression e (e can be a movement which includes 'sounds') can 'mean' this perceivable chair. If the 'meaning' should be some internal bodystate like the 'pain' connected to some tooth, then things are a bit more difficult; if person B until that moment didn't have some experience of pain connected to a tooth then person B will have some difficulty to 'understand' what person A 'means' with expression e. Because the bodies of human persons are heavily similar, there is some chance that we can come to some agreement about perceivable bodily states as long as these states cause similar 'feelings' inside the persons under comparable circumstances'. If we go 'deeper' inside a human person and look to 'feelings' and 'cognition' which have no direct correlate neither in objects of the shared empirical world nor in the similarities of our bodily structures, then the establishment of an agreement about the 'meaning' of a bodily expression e will become more and more difficult, eventually impossible. Try to explain the meaning of words like 'freedom', 'democracy', 'love', 'truth' etc, you will soon realize that the 'communication of ideas' on a 'high' level is requiring human persons which have many, many years of common training in the usage of bodily expressions called signs (gestures, texts, sounds, diagrams, ...), and even then can communication only work if all participants of a communication seriously 'want' to communicate, want to 'understand' and they are willingly to accept, that the exchange of bodily expressions is inherently difficult and can go wrong, because the relationships between bodily expressions and their 'intended meanings' can be extremely complex and are of a highly fragile nature. | |
| Knowing a bit about this 'nature of meaning' one will not be astonished about all the difficulties which arise out of situations where one person A tries to communicate something with another person B. Many (most?) angry and sad feelings of human persons about other human persons result from this difficulties of communication. Even if you have the 'best' intentions, you can end up in a disaster of communication if the other one --by some reasons unknown to you-- can not (or will not) 'understand' your bodily expressions in some moment of time. So many traps are present here. But, we cannot stop to communicate. The inherent difficulty of communication between human persons are a permanent challenge. To avoid communication because it could be difficult or because it could cause failures or troubles, is not a real option. You have to try, again, again, and again. Only with a working communication we can 'understand' each other a bit and we can 'cooperate' or even 'collaborate'. | |
| Now, let us move to a different, but similar, case, the communication with God. The 'meaning' of the word 'God' has a long history, because from the beginning human persons have dealt in some way with God. In the last 2000 years the knowledge and understanding of 'God' has 'sharpened', because the human race has 'learned' a lot about the world and themselves. To talk here about religion, even if we would restrict it to the 'big ones' (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam), would go beyond everything because about the christian religion alone do exist already hundreds of thousands written documents, millions of experiences of people; taken together with the Judaism, Islam etc. all this is beyond every single person can grasp and seriously understand. Thus we should be humble in speaking about this, knowing that we all the time are making guesses about things we do not really know completely (this holds for the experts too!). | |
| Whith that first understanding of the difficulties between human persons to 'express' some 'internal state' with bodily expressions to 'announce' the other persons with this expression some 'intended' meaning, perhaps we can get some first understanding about the difficulties to understand 'God' if he is 'speaking' with a human person. If we say --like many religions-- that God is the Almighty, the only one, eternal truth, eternal love, creator of the universe, only to mention a few attributes, then we should know, that there is a fundamental problem in understanding God. Beause God is so far beyond everything we know, it is for human persons in the normal case completely impossible to understand even a tiny part of God. There is not the slightest chance. Nobody expects from a new born baby that it can understand the talks of the leading experts of human sciences. Compared to God we are much, much less than newborn babies. So, is this case completely hopeless for us? | |
| If we look back to the preceding paragraphs we could see in the case of human communication that person B can --under certain circumstances-- 'know' something from person A if person A does 'express' some internal states by bodily expressions. Thus the 'unbodily ideas' of person A can in some way become 'visible' by bodily expressions e for person B. These bodily expressions e are not the 'unbodily ideas' as such, but in some way they can be used as a kind of vehicle, to cause similar 'unbodily ideas' in person B, if he can find a way to 'detect', what person A 'means' if he uses the bodily expressions e. Can this also work in the relationship between God and a human person? | |
| The answer to this question depends from the fact, what God really can --and will- do with human persons. In the course of history you can find in all religions persons which have been understood by their contemporaries as having a 'direct personal relationship' to God. Most of these people have talked about their experiences. Some have written them down or have dictated to persons to write it down. In those handed down experiences you can find an idea, we can circumscribe as follows: God alone can cause inside of a human person events directly without another intervening bodily cause. That, what a person experiences in that moment must not 'look' necessarily completely 'new', but the 'way' how you experience this, is 'unique'; these persons communicate, that in these situations they 'know' that 'God' is speaking. The 'content' of the 'ideas' which are given in that moment is a story on its own. It is not as simple as most people would think. | |